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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

Relying on coal on for 30%+ of their electricity

According to Wikipedia (quoting a source from jan 2021) 24% of energy production comes from coal.

According to the German Federal Statistical Office (report released a few weeks ago) it was 31.4% on the first half of the year up from 17.2% on the same period a year earlier. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

That's a small part of their sins. The big part is relying on gas for heating. When speaking with germans I've found that they think of gas as "clean" which sounds insane to me. Yeah, maybe locally, compared to coal, but it's their largest co2 emission source nevertheless.

I don't know anyone in germany who thinks gas is "clean". New buildings are built with heat pumps. They are considered clean if used with renewable energy.

But it's difficult to use them in old buildings and gas is said to be to most cleanest heating technology based on fossil fuels.

Heat pumps are amazing and a big step forward, but Germany's electricity is energized by natural gas peaker plants when there is not enough wind or solar generation operating.

Even if every German building was using heat pumps, they would still be burning TONS of natural gas to keep the electricity flowing consistently, because they have no long term energy storage solution to pair with renewables, especially through the long, dark winters when the sun rarely shines.

You imagine there is no plan because you do not know about the plans.

It would be stupid to build storage there is not renewable generating capacity to charge. When there is such capacity, they will then build out storage. In the meantime the correct place to spend is on generation. Which, in fact, is what they are doing.

Germany literally got the European Commission to label gas burning as "green energy" (!).

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ger...

https://www.dw.com/en/european-commission-declares-nuclear-a...

(Does that count as gaslighting? Sorry.)

The cited article says "a bridge for a limited transition period" and not "green energy".

So no, they don't want to label it green energy, they only prefer it to other fossil fuels and nuclear but the goal is to phase out natural gas as well.

The DW headline is "European Commission declares nuclear and gas to be green".

Is the state-owned DW/ARD not a trustworthy news source?

The article cites "gas and nuclear were labeled as "transitional" energy sources in the taxonomy".

So the news itself is correct but the headline abbreviates this very badly.

It’s “clean coal” all over again.

It is dishonest to conflate emergency war measures as policy.

Yeah the plan was to buy methane gas from Russia instead. Still a non renewable source, but the gas would have caused less CO2 emissions and less pollution (gas causes less CO2 per kilowatt hour). Of course, the war and the bombings of NordStream have put an end to that.

The gas would have been used to fill in while renewables were being built out. Now coal is filling in while renewables are being built out even faster.

Without the investment to date in wind, coal dependency would have been massively greater.

Yeah, note that a lot of those renewables won't be built in Germany but outside of it, as there is simply no capacity for this in Germany.

While Germany is a net exporter for electricity, it does import a large chunk of its total energy usage (electricity plus stuff like fuel for cars, heating, et). Stuff like coal or gas or oil. In 2017, it was from 70% of imports and 30% from energy harvested locally [0]. It's quite impossible that this can all be converted to renewable power sources originating in Germany.

So what will likely/hopefully happen is that the closer partner countries will supply electricity to Germany via cables, while countries from further away will send Hydrogen generated from renewable sources, that will then be burned in the already existing gas plants.

[0]: https://www.weltenergierat.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/810...

War is just the straw that broke the camel's back. Shutting down nuclear energy while depending on a dictator's gas set them to fail.

The emergency measures are needed because the peacetime policy was not designed to be resilient. A better peacetime policy would have obviated the need for destructive emergency measures.

If only they'd listened to someone who warned them four years ago while possessed by a rare display of competence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaBUNqVTkCs

The peacetime policy was to build renewable capacity. Now there is radically more renewable capacity than before, much more than if another direction had been chosen.

If 30% coal today is bad, >>30% coal, the alternative, would have been correspondingly worse.

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